1877 Russia

Description

Folding Plates, Illustrated, Original Binding, Publishers' Original Binding

Complete in two volumes. Fifth edition. Each volume is illustrated with a colour folding map to the front of the text. Collated complete. A detailed historical study of Russia inspired by the author's own travels across the country. With chapters on the Northern Forests, the peasantry, village communities, Finnish and Tartar villages, the mercantile classes, the Imperial Administration, the Noblesse, heretics, dissenters, the Cossacks, the Crimean War and its consequences, the emancipation of the serfs, territorial expansion, and more. Wallace accepted a private invitation to visit Russia, having a strong desire to study the Ossetes, a tribe of Iranian descent in the Caucasus. Living there from early 1870 until late 1875, Wallace found the Russian civilization far more interesting than he expected and published this work by 1877, right before the outbreak of the Russo-Turkish War. The book had great success, going through several editions and being translated into many languages. Written by Sir Donald Mackenzie Wallace, a Scottish public servant, writer, editor and foreign correspondent of The Times (London). Previously held in the library of Marianne North, a prolific English Victorian biologist and botanical artist, notable for her plant and landscape paintings, her extensive foreign travels, her writings, her plant discoveries and the creation of her gallery at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. With twelve leaves of publisher's advertisements to the rear of volume two.